Page 12

12

Secret Santa

Jake

Hand, foot, shin, forearm…Dolores and I dismantle her piece by piece. I’ve never done it this way before. The knife works but requires force. The fret saw is easier but messy. We make a few bad cuts before we find our groove, amputating exactly where the joints bend so the bolts in her titanium skeleton can be unscrewed. We stack her bits up like firewood, and then I vacuum the bathroom floor of silicone crumbs while Dolores spreads out wrapping paper on the plush carpet of the bedroom.

“What do you think, a foot for Billy? Will Johnny be jealous?” she asks.

She sits cross-legged in the middle of Grant’s floor in my robe, wearing a pair of yellow dish gloves to safeguard against fingerprints, her hair in a messy knot on top of her head, her sparkly earrings catching the light. She’s trash at wrapping gifts, in spite of her brag at the hardware store. I let her boss me around, and I steal glances at her, like I always do, while she works and swigs from a bottle of Grant’s wine like a pirate.

She’s mine for a few more hours.

She ties one last sloppy bow, stands, stretches, tosses her gloves on the bed, and plucks her dress off the floor.

“I need to get dressed,” she says, and I take the garbage bags full of Christmas presents to the front door. But—there’s a pair of shoes—and classical music wafts from the kitchen—“The Flight of the Bumblebee”—frantic, frenzied—

“Jake!”

No.

“Grant,” I say through my teeth.

“Jaaaake,” Grant says pleasantly. I never heard him arrive. He still has his coat on as he pulls a half-full bottle of white from the fridge and pours himself a glass, bouncing a little to the music. “What are you up to tonight?” he asks, as if we never had that conversation on the phone. “Just a regular night in?”

In my head Dolores is a blinking red dot in the floor plan of the apartment. She’s moving around in Grant’s room, while two dots pulse in the kitchen. I try to visualize an out for her—the window—an air vent—

“Yes.”

“You’re a creature of habit, Jake. You need to get out more. You need to meet people.”

He’s revved up. Expansive. He’s going to start talking about taking over the world any minute. Maybe he’ll have a nosebleed, or maybe this is pure Grant tonight. The music whips up, faster and faster, whining, keening.

“What you need, Jake, is to do therapy . It’s not normal to be so cut off from the world.”

“Yes.”

“I know a good therapist. She wears pencil skirts. Not every woman can wear a pencil skirt, you know. She pretended not to like that compliment when I gave it to her.”

“Yes.”

“Although”—he frowns—“I don’t know about her. She wasn’t happy to hear about Verity. She’s a very jealous woman. Women are jealous , Jake.”

“Yes.”

“It’s unprofessional of her to allow feelings like that to interfere with her doing her job,” Grant says, jumping rapidly from thought to thought, faster than a violinist’s fingers or a swarm of bees. “There’s a code of conduct, you know. There’s a board I could report her to.”

“Yes.”

“I should report her—I’m going to report her. Tomorrow. It’s so hard to find a good therapist, Jake. Which is terrible, because everyone needs to do therapy. I’d be out of business if people looked after their mental health. By the time I see them, they’ve gone off the deep end.”

“Yes.”

“Look at me: I take my mental health seriously. I’m very concerned about my mental health.”

I nod. “We’re all very concerned about your mental health.”

Grant smiles, flattered, and opens his mouth to reply, but no sound comes out. He’s frozen in place, staring over my shoulder. The back of my head down to my tailbone prickles and turns cold. No.

The music shuts off and, “Hello,” Dolores says from the entryway to the kitchen.

I swivel to look, and my stomach drops out onto the floor between my shoes. She’s poised with one finger on the power button of Grant’s expensive speakers, and she’s not wearing her red dress. She’s not wearing the bathrobe, either. For a split second I think she’s not wearing anything, but then I realize she got into Grant’s wardrobe, full of designer dresses and shoes and everything else a spoiled sex doll could want. She wears a formfitting long-sleeved dress the exact color of her skin tone, a dress that looks like tensor bandages stitched neatly together, or maybe strips of leather harvested from someone who was good about rubbing lotion on their skin, and a pair of painfully high nude heels to match. She looks like a Barbie, all her creases and hollows smoothed out, legs a mile long, everything airbrushed tan. Grant’s eyes slide all over her, tasting her, leaving invisible slime trails.

No. No, no, no.

“Hello,” Grant says, his voice slightly lower and slower than normal. “Grant Velazquez.”

Dolores steps into the kitchen and takes the glass of wine from his hands, as if he’d been holding it out to her.

Don’t . Don’t, don’t, don’t—

Dolores dela Cruz is no idiot. “You can call me Dolly.”

Grant’s gaze swings back and forth between the two of us. He wants an explanation, now .

Dolly obliges. “Your…butler?…brought me here to help you,” Dolly says over the rim of her wineglass.

That breaks the ice. Grant glances at me and guffaws. “Butler! Ha! Hahahaha!”

“He brought me in for my… services .”

She means her body disposal services, but Grant’s face goes serious—too serious. He shoots me a betrayed look. A call girl . A beautiful, sophisticated one, but a call girl . How could I do this to him? Don’t I remember how it is for him? Don’t I remember all those traumatic experiences in the past from bringing real woman back to his penthouse—all those women who expected sex when all he wanted was an intellectual connection, a connection of the soul —

I know exactly what Grant is saying with his eyes because he’s said it out loud to me a million times, late at night, when he couldn’t sleep, and therefore wouldn’t allow me to.

But Dolly isn’t done speaking. She stalks over to the sitting area and says over her shoulder, “I have a very special set of skills, as a matter of fact.” She drawls her words slowly, punctuating each one with a step, the red soles of her shoes flashing like she’s been traipsing through puddles of blood. She stops in front of the snow-white armchair in the middle of the living room.

“What do you do?” Grant asks grudgingly.

“What do I do? I’m a”—Dolly pirouettes on the spot—“ psychologist .” She flounces into the armchair and caresses the armrests meaningfully. She’s an armchair psychologist.

Grant’s jaw drops and his eyes light up, and he shoots me a look of pure gratitude. He loves psychologists. Better than psychiatrists, because there’s more talking and fewer pills. Better than therapists, too—therapists are lightweights. They get skittish and fire him after a couple of sessions, as Pencil Skirt is about to do. He sweeps Dolly with his eyes again—she can definitely pull off a pencil skirt.

“Are you taking new patients? What’s your specialty?”

She cocks her head. “Sociopaths, egomaniacs, garden-variety perverts…You’d be amazed at what comes my way. But my roster’s quite full. I just took on an aspiring serial killer who has an unhealthy fixation with a coworker. It would have to be quite an interesting case to tempt me to take on a new patient.” She narrows her eyes appraisingly. “Why, do you have something good for me? You seem so”—she chews her lower lip, then purrs the dirtiest word she can summon—“normal.”

“I’m not normal,” Grant brags.

“Hmm. I don’t believe it.” She leans back in the armchair, crossing her legs sinuously, languorously, her movements those of a cat settling into a sunbeam, and the hem of her dress rises slightly to reveal the bottom of a tattoo dangling down her thigh. She scratches her red claws absently on the armrests, and Grant takes it all in, a flush settling on the back of his neck.

“I’m not normal,” he insists.

Dolly drinks deeply of her wine. “Tell me everything, Grant.”

Grant settles on the white sofa next to her armchair and pulls out the big guns. “I’m a workaholic. I work eighty hours a week. Grisly cases. My favorites are the murders, though—I love a good murder—”

Dolly holds up one hand, a slight furrow to her brow. She glances at me.

“He’s a criminal lawyer,” I interject.

She raises her eyebrows, amused. “A criminal lawyer or a criminal lawyer?”

Grant soldiers on without missing a beat. “I want to find love, but I have no time for relationships—”

Dolly yawns prettily, and Grant’s speech becomes more urgent.

“I haven’t dated in five years,” he says. “No, six. Women are interested,” he avers, trying to catch her interest. “Very interested. I mean…” Here, Grant waves around at the minimalist opulence of our surroundings. Only extreme poverty and extreme wealth can produce this level of Spartan bareness. “I could have a lot of women. A lot of women are interested in me.” He frowns at Dolly, who is examining her nails, not interested in him at all.

“It must be difficult watching your butler enjoy a more vibrant love life than you,” Dolly says, deftly manipulating Grant for information about me.

“Jake?” He scoffs, shoots a disbelieving look at me. “Jake doesn’t have a…significant other.” Grant frowns, like perhaps this is the first time he’s wondered which way I swing. I have never had a guest over, and I have never been on a date the entire time he’s known me. I’m a piece of furniture in his life. A robot. I could be a eunuch for all he knows.

“Hmmm. Maybe not a significant other. But when he has a date over—”

Grant laughs at this preposterous image. A giant neon sign reading LOSER flickers and hums above my head, and Dolly watches me with a satisfied expression. She dangles the shoe off the tip of her toes, and both Grant and I watch it.

Grant lunges desperately for Dolly’s interest. He wants to get things back on track. “I—I don’t like sex,” he tries. “At all. A sexual connection feels cheap, but that’s what all of these women want. Sex. Sex-sex-sex. What I want is the connection of mind and soul . I want a soulmate, I want my person , and I want to be someone else’s person.” What he wants is to sound poetic and romantic, but nothing piques Dolly’s interest. He frowns at her apathy, then bites the ring, yanks, and throws his grenade.

“So I spend about a hundred thousand dollars a year purchasing silicone dolls instead.”

He waits for it to explode, but of course Dolly doesn’t even flinch. She uncoils her legs and sits up straight, and Grant is finally happy: she’s interested in him.

“Is it because you want to be in control?” Dolly asks with thinly veiled excitement. “You want them to stay here in your apartment and never leave? You want to pick their names, and their clothes?”

Grant blinks. “No.”

“You like that they don’t have personalities and opinions, and families and friends?”

Grant frowns. “No.”

Dolly deflates infinitesimally. “So what’s the appeal of dolls?”

Grant blinks again. “I feel less lonely with one around.”

“Why?”

“Because…I feel less misunderstood. I don’t need to feel understood, but at least not misunderstood .”

Surprise, but then Dolly’s face settles into a cool, professional expression. She swirls her wineglass thoughtfully. “So where is the problem, Grant?”

Grant stares at her mutely. “What?”

“You’ve told me that you can’t get your needs met by real, live women, and that you’ve figured out a work-around. Where is the problem?”

Grant has no answer.

“Here’s my professional opinion: you don’t need to fix anything. You’ve found a way to be happy without making anyone else unhappy. Do you know how rare that is?”

“But—”

Dolly shakes her head. “Connecting with another human being is difficult. Other people make it look easy, maybe, but some of us…some of us are like those endangered mountain cats, who have to live thinly spread out over vast tracts of land in order to survive, and only encounter another of our species rarely and fleetingly.”

Dolly glances at me, her eyes glinting like those of a rangy mountain predator, and maybe she doesn’t see a giant flashing sign above my head. She spots a fellow prowler in the distance, just as hungry and starved for company as she.

“I think someday you’ll meet her, Grant. We all do, eventually.” She gets to her feet and stalks over to me, holding my gaze, and I feel warm.

We all do, eventually. Suck a dick, Grant .

“Thank you for the wine, but Jake and I have to go now.”

“What? Where?”

“We have to drop off some Christmas presents,” I say, and Dolores smiles for me. “There’s a toy drive at the Children’s Hospital.”

“Oh.” Grant frowns.

I grab the sacks of wrapped presents by the door, and Dolores puts on her black trench coat and slips out of Grant’s life forever, while he stares after her, his heart ripped from his chest.

—

We don’t go to the Children’s Hospital. We deposit a foot on the doorstep of a podiatrist’s office. A hand at the YMCA. Dolores clutches her phone in front of her and barks directions at me. I pull up, and she darts out, barefoot, and runs to deposit a gift, and runs back again, over and over and over. Close to one in the morning, she makes me drive left, and left, then right, and we pull up in front of a squat, boring apartment building sprouting from the ground amidst ranks of similar squat, boring apartment buildings.

“Who lives here?”

“I do,” she says.

I would never have pictured this, but I don’t know what I would have imagined for her. I look at her, and her eyes gleam in the dim light of the interior of the car. She’s cradling the last Christmas package in her arms: the head.

“You sure know how to show a girl a good time. It’s been a real slice.” She makes a slicing motion across her throat. “Sleep tight in that cold, hospital-cornered bed of yours. Is it meant to remind you of the comforts of the asylum for the criminally insane?”

“Yes. And what about you? Are you a coffin sleeper or do you hang by your toes from the rod in the closet?”

She shakes her head. “I usually just spin a web in the corner.”

Her hair is still pulled up in a knot on top of her head, and I can admire the shape of her skull, the slenderness of her neck. She bends to slip her stolen shoes back on, and from the side, I can make out the vertebrae of her spine tenting the soft skin where her neck meets her shoulders. Her little ulnar bones, her delicate hands, her carefully articulated ankles, the expressive arch of her foot. Her skeleton would be very beautiful.

And because she reads minds, she says, “You’re looking at me like you’re imagining picking the meat from my bones.”

And so of course I drift in, and I don’t think I imagine her drawing nearer too—

“I’m glad you asked for help tonight,” she says, and I can almost feel her breath on my face. “It isn’t easy for those of us in this line of work. It’s just about impossible to stay in the business long enough these days to reach serial status, what with video surveillance, cell phone towers, DNA databases…”

“Just one more job being destroyed by technology.”

She smiles at me, an actual smile.

“If you ever need help disposing of a body…” I tell her. Her smile fades away, and she considers me very seriously, but she doesn’t seem unhappy with me.

“Good night, Dolores.”

“Dodi,” she whispers.

“What?”

She holds my eyes and hesitates for a moment. “It’s been a long time since anyone called me that.”

“Dodi.”

She tilts her head, like she’s weighing how it sounds in her ear, and her eyes flick down to my lips. But there’s a small knot of something in my chest, ever since she psychoanalyzed Grant.

“What did you think of Grant?”

Dolores sighs indulgently. “He’s definitely not a serial killer.” The way she looks at me says, He’s not part of our little club, is he?

“You seemed to like him.”

Dodi lifts a brow, amused. “He’s not weird enough for me.” She glances at my mouth again, and now her fingertips find the side of my face. I tingle where she touches me.

“You know, I’ve been waiting all night for you to come in for the kill,” she whispers. “But I know why you haven’t.”

“Why?”

“You don’t have a clue how to finish me off, or what to do with my body.”

She’s so pleased with her little joke.

“I know exactly what to do with it,” I say. “I have a very particular MO of my own.”

I absolutely do not.

“Come up and show me?”

“I’m allergic to cats.”

Her lips quirk. “My neighbor is borrowing her. Doesn’t have one of her own. And it’s not like I can leave her alone when I go out. She’ll climb the curtains. Leave hairballs in my shoes. It’s a whole thing. Come up, Jake.”

She leans in close, and now I know we’re going to kiss…but I’m an idiot who still wants reassurance. A different sort of reassurance this time. She notices a change in my face, because she stops an inch from me.

I unglue my tongue. “It’s just…it must be difficult, being a Black Widow. Breaking your heart on the job every day. What if you develop feelings?”

She pulls back, annoyed. “Don’t flatter yourself. I don’t get attached to my victims.” She frowns at me, like she’s seeing me afresh. “Forget I asked. I haven’t restocked on lye since my last date, anyway.”

She scrabbles with the ridiculous door handle, and before I can stop her, she’s slipped out into the night. I watch Dolores— Dodi —speed-walk to her apartment, her coat flapping like a cape, Verity’s head cradled in her arms. She doesn’t look back.

I stay there for a while, the car silent, the street silent, as the inside of the car gets colder and colder.

There was something about the stillness of night, the closeness of her face to mine, the strangeness of our conversation. I felt like we’d unlocked a moment in which I could say anything. I almost told her, then, about the thoughts that go bump in the night. I almost asked her about her offer to do away with me, on the roof. Is she really capable of something like that?

But I didn’t ask her. Because there’s something there.

I’ve been casing her out, taking her measure, and here we’ve run aground on something hidden underneath. Her own buried bodies. Something I don’t understand yet, a secret she still doesn’t trust me with.

And to think I almost told her my secret.